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Submitting poems to magazines gives me enough closure that I can cross them off my list of "things to revise" until the rejection letters start trickling in. I am in a phase where I am easily overwhelmed by everything I want to do, which covers, at this moment, writing projects, musical instruments, languages, and learning to change the oil in my car. So it's nice that I have an ink cartridge in my printer again and can play the "buy myself 3 months to not worry about this old writing so I can focus on new things" game.

In the meantime, the woman with 22 husbands has me thinking in lists. And where is that noir project? It's still there. Festering. Fester fester. I am stuck on guns, the very big and difficult issue of female characters as treated in film noir, personification/anthropomorphizing of the mis-en-scene. The city has sex.

Once I tried to explain why journalism and poetry are not, in fact, contradictory practices, and there was no need for me to assume a pen name if I ever got published. Pretend I just explained it very convincingly. Maybe later. Also, 9 out of 10 poets I've talked to recently agree that it's annoying when readers assume every "I" refers to "I, the poet," and not "I, the voice assumed by the poet in order to express an idea." It's a game, we make things up just like those people who write in full sentences and fill entire pages without significant breaks. I work all day at accuracy, veracity, and not being too inventive. I come home and I want to play, bust down all the doors of the English language with my left shoulder.

Being published would be nice but that's all a game, too. It would just make me feel more justified in spending the time.